“We are all selective sinners. We choose the sins we are comfortable with and judge others for the ones we can’t accept.”
Retired Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) Deputy President Mahomed Navsa quotes Shams Tabrizi to launch his report into the internecine battle between University of Cape Town (UCT) Council members.
He promises that the relevance of those words “will become apparent”. It has, though not in the way he or UCT Council Chair Adv Norman Arendse SC may have intended.
On October 20, Arendse posted a letter on the Chair’s Page of UCT’s news website. He said Council had met two days earlier to adopt reports by Navsa and retired SCA Judge Malcolm Wallis on 50 complaints by Council members against fellow members, and Senate members against Council members, under its Code of Conduct.
He published links to view these two reports.
Arendse wrote that only two members were found in breach, and that Navsa recommended expelling one and suspending the other for six months. He said that Council has appointed a subcommittee of five members to consider the report in relation to these two members and to afford them an opportunity to make representations before a decision is taken on an appropriate sanction, if any.
Arendse omits to say that he was the subject of seven of those complaints. Nor does he say that those complaints range from failing to disclose material facts before Council adopted its Gaza resolutions in June 2024, to refusing to recuse himself from a special meeting called to hold him to account.
Four of those complaints came from fellow Council member Adv Kessler Perumalsamy, a junior advocate at the Cape Bar, where Arendse practises. Juniors do not lightly take on a silk at their own Bar. It’s a brave move.
One of Perumalsamy’s complaints accuses Arendse of failing to tell Council what he knew about donor funding before it adopted the Gaza resolutions.
That is hardly a secret. Arendse himself told Navsa it is “in substance, the first and primary ground of review” in UCT history professor Adam Mendelsohn’s ongoing challenge to the resolutions he lodged in the Western Cape High Court in August 2024.
Navsa dismissed all seven complaints against Arendse. Arendse posted his report, with names of the members of Senate who made complaints against Council blacked out, together with names of individuals not on the Council mentioned in general deliberation of the complaints.
UCT Council has not made a habit of transparency with investigation reports. The one into complaints against Vice-Chancellor Prof Mosa Moshabela has been withheld since the end of May and is the subject of an application to compel in the Western Cape High Court.
Yet these two judges’ reports Arendse makes public after just two days.
A retired Judge finds in his favour on the same subject matter of a pending High Court case in front of a full bench of three judges. This is arguably to Arendse’s benefit to be in the public domain.
Conversely, Wallis’ report does not deal with complaints against Arendse. It mentions in passing highly sensitive confidential information in relation to the Dean of a UCT faculty. This was not redacted.
Ironically, Wallis devotes several paragraphs of his report to Council’s duty of confidentiality. What members may not share with outsiders, he writes, is “who said what and to whom”. The published reports are full of exactly that. They quote members verbatim from transcripts and recordings of closed meetings.
Consider the optics.
Arendse shares a report that exonerates him, in a form redacted to protect the identity of Senate members. Yet the report that does not mention him or benefit him is not handled with the same level of care and scrutiny and humiliates a senior member of staff.
This failure exposes UCT to risk and the potential for significant collateral damage.
In a process already heavily laden with irony, the innocent person who may have paid the highest price in this shambolic process – a dean of one of UCT’s faculties, an academic who has taught generations of eager minds – never even laid a complaint.
That academic has good reason to lay a complaint now.
The Wallis report sets out confidential information from the dean’s selection process. One Council member objected to that information being shared, even inside the Council chamber.
Wallis found that members were entitled to raise it there. He did not suggest that the whole world was entitled to read it from the Chair’s online desk.
The Wallis report also describes a Council session held under “extreme confidentiality”. Members handed over phones and laptops and received documents watermarked with their names, so that any leak could be traced.
Information that Council locked away with watermarks is now public, through reports published under the Chair’s name.
Links to the two judges’ reports were removed from the Chair’s letter after about a day. This removal does not magically delete the reports from the public domain. They spread like digital wildfire through the University community and beyond.
This leaves UCT open to defamation claims and scrutiny under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). Whether downloaded and read in detail, or skimmed briefly before the take-down, these reports highlight to the reader a polarised Council.
Leaders are entitled to philosophical differences. In fact, it makes for critical decision-making. It takes a strong chair to harness those differences for the best interests of the university.
Wallis notes in his report: “One of the functions of the chair of Council is to control meetings and to interpose to calm matters and provide an opportunity for frayed tempers to be soothed.”
Unmentioned in all of this is the financial bill for these reports – an estimated R1.5-million in judges’ and attorneys’ fees, paid from Council’s legal budget. Add to that the hours spent by Council members, most of them professionals.
Their time could have been better spent steering a university whose VC told Parliament in June 2026 that it had lost about R250-million in funding following adoption of the Gaza resolutions.
Navsa promised that Tabrizi’s words would prove relevant. Arendse made sure of it by choosing the sin he was comfortable with.
As has become his habit, others are likely to carry the cost. Only this time, he may have overreached himself by weaponising the Council complaints code and costing UCT a fortune on his own chess game.
Arendse’s apology, Moshabela’s leadership
Council Chair Adv Norman Arendse SC issued a statement on October 23 on UCT’s website, that included an apology, but only on Council’s behalf for release of the judges’ reports.
It was left to Vice-Chancellor Prof Mosa Moshabela to show what exceptional leadership looks and reads like in his statement on UCT’s website on October 26.
Moshabela acknowledged that Council withdrawing the links to the judges’ reports was the “right step”. However, he said that it “cannot recall what may have already been read, downloaded”, and that for “the people concerned, the harm is real and it continues”.
Despite playing no part whatsoever in that harm, including to UCT’s Dean of the Faculty of Law, Prof Mohamed Paleker, Moshabela apologised “deeply” to Paleker for what he had experienced. He added that “many in the Faculty of Law – among its staff, students and alumni – “share that distress”.
He ended by saying: “UCT asks a great deal of the people who serve it. In return, they are entitled to expect that every part of this institution, its Council and its executive alike, will treat their dignity with care. Openness and respect for people are both part of who we are, and we must hold ourselves to both. I am confident that we will learn from this together, and that the university will be stronger for it.”
*UCT was emailed for comment on who has final responsibility for posts on its website from the Desk of the UCT Council Chair and why two reports of retired justices Navsa and Wallis were made available on that section and then removed within days. At the time of publication, no response was received.
- Sboros is a freelance journalist, editor and author
- UCT Council Chair Adv Norman Arendse SC published two reports by retired judges Mahomed Navsa and Malcolm Wallis on complaints against Council members, revealing only two members were found in breach.
- Seven complaints against Arendse, including failing to disclose donor funding before the Gaza resolutions and refusing to recuse himself from a related meeting, were all dismissed by Navsa.
- Wallis' report disclosed confidential information about a UCT dean's selection process without redaction, causing potential harm to the academic involved and raising privacy concerns.
- The judges’ reports were initially accessible online but removed after a day, though copies had already spread widely, exposing UCT to defamation risks and scrutiny under POPIA.
- UCT Vice-Chancellor Prof Mosa Moshabela apologized on behalf of the university to the affected dean and emphasized the need for dignity, openness, and respect within the institution.
